1.
Chicory
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Common chicory, Cichorium intybus, is a somewhat woody, perennial herbaceous plant of the dandelion family Asteraceae, usually with bright blue flowers, rarely white or pink. Many varieties are cultivated for salad leaves, chicons, or roots, which are baked, ground and it is also grown as a forage crop for livestock. It lives as a plant on roadsides in its native Europe, and is now common in North America, China, and Australia. Chicory is also the name in the United States for curly endive. Common names for varieties of var. foliosum include endive, radicchio, radichetta, Belgian endive, French endive, red endive, sugarloaf, when flowering, chicory has a tough, grooved, and more or less hairy stem, from 30 to 100 cm tall. The leaves are stalked, lanceolate and unlobed, the flower heads are 2 to 4 cm wide, and usually bright blue, rarely white or pink. Of the two rows of bracts, the inner is longer and erect, the outer is shorter. It flowers from July until October, the achenes have no pappus, but do have toothed scales on top. Wild chicory leaves usually have a bitter taste and their bitterness is appreciated in certain cuisines, such as in the Ligurian and Apulian regions of Italy and also in southern part of India along with coffee, in Catalonia, Greece, and Turkey. In Albania, the leaves are used as a substitute, mainly served simmered and marinated in olive oil. By cooking and discarding the water, the bitterness is reduced, after which the leaves may be sautéed with garlic, anchovies. In this form, the resulting greens might be combined with pasta or accompany meat dishes, Chicory may be cultivated for its leaves, usually eaten raw as salad leaves. Cultivated chicory is generally divided into three types, of which there are many varieties, Radicchio usually has variegated red or red, some only refer to the white-veined red-leaved type as radicchio, also known as red endive and red chicory. It has a bitter and spicy taste, which mellows when it is grilled or roasted and it can also be used to add color and zest to salads. It is largely used in Italy in different varieties, the most famous being the ones from Treviso, from Verona, and Chioggia and it is also common in Greece. Sugarloaf looks rather like cos lettuce, with tightly packed leaves and it has a small head of cream-coloured, bitter leaves. It is grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight to prevent the leaves from turning green, the plant has to be kept just below the soil surface as it grows, only showing the very tip of the leaves. It is often wrapped in blue paper to protect it from light, so to preserve its pale colour
2.
Malala Yousafzai
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Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. Her advocacy has since grown into an international movement, Yousafzai was born in Swat District, Pakistan. Her family came to run a chain of schools in the region, in early 2009, when she was 11–12, she wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC Urdu detailing her life during the Taliban occupation of Swat. The following summer, journalist Adam B, ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region. She rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, on the afternoon of 9 October 2012, Yousafzai was injured after a Taliban gunman attempted to murder her. The murder attempt sparked a national and international outpouring of support for Yousafzai, deutsche Welle wrote in January 2013 that she may have become the most famous teenager in the world. Weeks after her attempt, a group of fifty leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her. Since recovering, Yousafzai became a prominent education activist, based out of Birmingham, she founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit and in 2013 co-authored a I am Malala, an international bestseller. In 2015, Yousafzai was a subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary He Named Me Malala, the 2013,2014 and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured her as one of the most Influential people globally. In 2012, she was the recipient of Pakistans first National Youth Peace Prize, aged 17 at the time, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. Since March 2013, she has been a pupil at the all-girls Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, Yousafzai was born on 12 July,1997 in the Swat District of Pakistans northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to Ziauddin Yousafzai and Tor Pekai Yousafzai. Her family is a Sunni Muslim family of Pashtun ethnicity and she was given her first name Malala after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. Her last name, Yousafzai, is that of a large Pashtun tribal confederation that is predominant in Pakistans Swat Valley, where she grew up. At her house in Mingora, she lived with her two brothers, Khushal and Atal, her parents, Ziauddin and Tor Pekai. She once stated to an interviewer that she would like to become a doctor, Ziauddin referred to his daughter as something entirely special, allowing her to stay up at night and talk about politics after her two brothers had been sent to bed. Yousafzai started speaking about education rights as early as September 2008, how dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education. Yousafzai asked her audience in a covered by newspapers and television channels throughout the region. In late 2008, Aamer Ahmed Khan of the BBC Urdu website and they decided to ask a schoolgirl to blog anonymously about her life there
3.
Taxonomy (biology)
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Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the remains, the conception, naming. There is some disagreement as to whether biological nomenclature is considered a part of taxonomy, the broadest meaning of taxonomy is used here. The word taxonomy was introduced in 1813 by Candolle, in his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, the term alpha taxonomy is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, ideals can, it may be said, never be completely realized. They have, however, a value of acting as permanent stimulants. Some of us please ourselves by thinking we are now groping in a beta taxonomy, turrill thus explicitly excludes from alpha taxonomy various areas of study that he includes within taxonomy as a whole, such as ecology, physiology, genetics, and cytology. He further excludes phylogenetic reconstruction from alpha taxonomy, thus, Ernst Mayr in 1968 defined beta taxonomy as the classification of ranks higher than species. This activity is what the term denotes, it is also referred to as beta taxonomy. How species should be defined in a group of organisms gives rise to practical and theoretical problems that are referred to as the species problem. The scientific work of deciding how to define species has been called microtaxonomy, by extension, macrotaxonomy is the study of groups at higher taxonomic ranks, from subgenus and above only, than species. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, earlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in scientific thinking. Early taxonomy was based on criteria, the so-called artificial systems. Later came systems based on a complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as natural systems, such as those of de Jussieu, de Candolle and Bentham. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species led to new ways of thinking about classification based on evolutionary relationships and this was the concept of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those of Eichler and Engler, the advent of molecular genetics and statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of phylogenetic systems based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone. Taxonomy has been called the worlds oldest profession, and naming and classifying our surroundings has likely been taking place as long as mankind has been able to communicate
4.
Plant
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Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. The term is generally limited to the green plants, which form an unranked clade Viridiplantae. This includes the plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Green plants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts and their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although reproduction is also common. There are about 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, green plants provide most of the worlds molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earths ecologies, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankinds basic foodstuffs, Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and, until recently and in variety, they have served as the source of most medicines. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology, Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided, the other is animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who distinguished between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their food. Much later, when Linnaeus created the basis of the system of scientific classification. Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as originally defined included several unrelated groups, however, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in popular contexts. When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a group of organisms or taxon. The evolutionary history of plants is not yet settled. Those which have been called plants are in bold, the way in which the groups of green algae are combined and named varies considerably between authors. Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce energy through photosynthesis, most conspicuous among the algae are the seaweeds, multicellular algae that may roughly resemble land plants, but are classified among the brown, red and green algae. Each of these groups also includes various microscopic and single-celled organisms
5.
Flowering plant
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The flowering plants, also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants, with 416 families, approx. 13,164 known genera and a total of c.295,383 known species, etymologically, angiosperm means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure, in other words, a fruiting plant. The term angiosperm comes from the Greek composite word meaning enclosed seeds, the ancestors of flowering plants diverged from gymnosperms in the Triassic Period, during the range 245 to 202 million years ago, and the first flowering plants are known from 160 mya. They diversified extensively during the Lower Cretaceous, became widespread by 120 mya, angiosperms differ from other seed plants in several ways, described in the table. These distinguishing characteristics taken together have made the angiosperms the most diverse and numerous land plants, the amount and complexity of tissue-formation in flowering plants exceeds that of gymnosperms. The vascular bundles of the stem are arranged such that the xylem and phloem form concentric rings, in the dicotyledons, the bundles in the very young stem are arranged in an open ring, separating a central pith from an outer cortex. In each bundle, separating the xylem and phloem, is a layer of meristem or active formative tissue known as cambium, the soft phloem becomes crushed, but the hard wood persists and forms the bulk of the stem and branches of the woody perennial. Among the monocotyledons, the bundles are more numerous in the stem and are scattered through the ground tissue. They contain no cambium and once formed the stem increases in diameter only in exceptional cases, the characteristic feature of angiosperms is the flower. Flowers show remarkable variation in form and elaboration, and provide the most trustworthy external characteristics for establishing relationships among angiosperm species, the function of the flower is to ensure fertilization of the ovule and development of fruit containing seeds. The floral apparatus may arise terminally on a shoot or from the axil of a leaf, occasionally, as in violets, a flower arises singly in the axil of an ordinary foliage-leaf. There are two kinds of cells produced by flowers. Microspores, which divide to become pollen grains, are the male cells and are borne in the stamens. The female cells called megaspores, which divide to become the egg cell, are contained in the ovule. The flower may consist only of parts, as in willow. Usually, other structures are present and serve to protect the sporophylls, the individual members of these surrounding structures are known as sepals and petals. The outer series is usually green and leaf-like, and functions to protect the rest of the flower, the inner series is, in general, white or brightly colored, and is more delicate in structure. It functions to attract insect or bird pollinators, attraction is effected by color, scent, and nectar, which may be secreted in some part of the flower
6.
Asteraceae
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Asteraceae or Compositae is a very large and widespread family of flowering plants. The family currently has 32,913 accepted species names, in 1,911 genera and 13 subfamilies, in terms of numbers of species, the Asteraceae are rivaled only by the Orchidaceae. Many members have composite flowers in the form of flower heads surrounded by involucral bracts, when viewed from a distance, each capitulum may have the appearance of being a single flower. The name Asteraceae comes from the type genus Aster, from the Greek ἀστήρ, meaning star, Compositae is an older but still valid name which refers to the fact that the family is one of the few angiosperm ones to have composite flowers. Most members of Asteraceae are herbaceous, but a significant number are also shrubs, vines, the family has a worldwide distribution, from the polar regions to the tropics, colonizing a wide variety of habitats. It is most common in the arid and semiarid regions of subtropical, the Asteraceae may represent as much as 10% of autochthonous flora in many regions of the world. Asteraceae is an important family, providing products such as cooking oils, lettuce, sunflower seeds, artichokes, sweetening agents, coffee substitutes. Several genera are of importance, including pot marigold, Calendula officinalis, Echinacea, various daisies, fleabane, chrysanthemums, dahlias, zinnias. Asteraceae are important in medicine, including Grindelia, yarrow. A number of species are considered invasive, including, most notably in North America, dandelion, the name Asteraceae comes to international scientific vocabulary from New Latin, from Aster, the type genus, + -aceae, a standardized suffix for plant family names in modern taxonomy. The genus name comes from the Classical Latin word aster, star, Compositae, an older but still valid name, means composite and refers to the characteristic inflorescence, a special type of pseudanthium found in only a few other angiosperm families. The study of family is known as synantherology. The vernacular name daisy, widely applied to members of family, is derived from its Old English name, dægesege, from dæges eage. This is because the open at dawn and close at dusk. Composite flowers have a distribution, and are found everywhere except Antarctica. They are especially numerous in tropical and subtropical regions, Compositae were first described in 1792 by the German botanist Paul Dietrich Giseke. Traditionally, two subfamilies were recognised, Asteroideae and Cichorioideae, the latter has been shown to be extensively paraphyletic, and has now been divided into 12 subfamilies, but the former still stands. The phylogenetic tree presented below is based on Panero & Funk updated in 2014, the diamond denotes a very poorly supported node, the dot a poorly supported node
7.
Centaurea
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For the race horse, see Australasian Oaks or Storm Queen Stakes. Basket flower and spelling variants redirect here, in Australia, this usually means the unrelated plant Adenanthos obovatus. Centaurea is a genus of between 350 and 600 species of herbaceous flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. Members of the genus are found north of the equator, mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. Common names for this genus are centaury, centory, starthistles, knapweeds, centaureas and the more ambiguous bluets, the Plectocephalus group – possibly a distinct genus – is known as basketflowers. Cornflowers is used for a few species, but that more often specifically means C. cyanus. The common name centaury is sometimes used, although this refers to the unrelated plant genus Centaurium. Their leaves, spiny in some species, are deeply divided into elongated lobes at least in the plants lower part. The flowers are diverse in colour, ranging from blues, reds and yellows to any mixture of these. Often, the flowers are much darker or lighter than the ray flowers. Each pseudanthium sits atop a cup- or basket-like cluster of scaly bracts, many species, in particular those inhabiting more arid regions, have a long and strong taproot. Certain knapweeds have a tendency to dominate large stretches of landscape together with a few other plants, the common knapweed for example is plentiful in the mesotrophic grasslands of England and nearby regions. It is most prominently found in pastures or meadows dominated by cocks-foot as well as either of crested dogs-tail and false oat-grass. It is also found in mesotrophic grassland on rendzinas and similar calcareous soils in association with glaucous sedge, sheeps fescue. In these grasslands, greater knapweed is found more rarely by comparison, often in association with red fescue in addition to cocks-foot. Due to their habit of dominating ecosystems under good conditions, many Centaurea species can become invasive weeds in regions where they are not native, in parts of North America, diffuse knapweed, spotted knapweed and yellow starthistle cause severe problems in agriculture due to their uncontrolled spread. The seeds are transported by human traffic, in particular the tires of all-terrain vehicles. The two knapweeds are harmful mainly because they are strongly allelopathic, producing powerful toxins in their roots that stunt the growth of plants around them not adapted to this
8.
Carl Linnaeus
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Carl Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature. He is known by the father of modern taxonomy. Many of his writings were in Latin, and his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus, Linnaeus was born in the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his education at Uppsala University. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published a first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands and he then returned to Sweden, where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, at the time of his death, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message, Tell him I know no man on earth. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, Swedish author August Strindberg wrote, Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist. Among other compliments, Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum, The Pliny of the North and he is also considered as one of the founders of modern ecology. In botany, the abbreviation used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for species names is L. In older publications, sometimes the abbreviation Linn. is found, Linnæus was born in the village of Råshult in Småland, Sweden, on 23 May 1707. He was the first child of Nicolaus Ingemarsson and Christina Brodersonia and his siblings were Anna Maria Linnæa, Sofia Juliana Linnæa, Samuel Linnæus, and Emerentia Linnæa. One of a line of peasants and priests, Nils was an amateur botanist, a Lutheran minister. Christina was the daughter of the rector of Stenbrohult, Samuel Brodersonius, a year after Linnæus birth, his grandfather Samuel Brodersonius died, and his father Nils became the rector of Stenbrohult. The family moved into the rectory from the curates house, even in his early years, Linnæus seemed to have a liking for plants, flowers in particular. Whenever he was upset, he was given a flower, which calmed him. Nils spent much time in his garden and often showed flowers to Linnaeus, soon Linnæus was given his own patch of earth where he could grow plants
9.
Grain
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Grains are small, hard, dry seeds, with or without attached hulls or fruit layers, harvested for human or animal consumption. Agronomists also call the plants producing such seeds grain crops, the two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals such as wheat and rye, and legumes such as beans and soybeans. Because of the ubiquity of grain as a source, the term grain is often used to describe something small. After being harvested, dry grains are more durable than other foods, such as starchy fruits. Thus, major global commodity markets exist for canola, maize, rice, soybeans, wheat, in botany, grains and cereals are synonymous with caryopses, the fruits of the grass family. In agronomy and commerce, seeds or fruits from other plant families are called if they resemble caryopses. For example, amaranth is sold as grain amaranth, and amaranth products may be described as whole grains, the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the Andes had grain-based food systems but, at the higher elevations, none of the grains was a cereal. All three grains native to the Andes are broad-leafed plants rather than such as corn, rice. All cereal crops are members of the grass family, cereal grains contain a substantial amount of starch, a carbohydrate that provides dietary energy. As is the case all other whole plant foods, pulses also contain carbohydrate. Vegetable oils provide dietary energy and some essential fatty acids and they are also used as fuel or lubricants. Those who handle grain at grain facilities may encounter numerous occupational hazards, risks include grain entrapment, where workers are submerged in the grain and unable to remove themselves, explosions caused by fine particles of grain dust, and falls
10.
Endangered species
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An endangered species is a species which has been categorized as likely to become extinct. In 2012, the IUCN Red List featured 3079 animal and 2655 plant species as endangered worldwide, the figures for 1998 were, respectively,1102 and 1197. Many nations have laws that protect conservation-reliant species, for example, population numbers, trends and species conservation status can be found in the lists of organisms by population. The conservation status of a species indicates the likelihood that it will become extinct, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the best-known worldwide conservation status listing and ranking system. Over 40% of the species are estimated to be at risk of extinction. Internationally,199 countries have signed an accord to create Biodiversity Action Plans that will protect endangered, in the United States, such plans are usually called Species Recovery Plans. Those species of Near Threatened and Least Concern status have been assessed and found to have relatively robust and healthy populations, though these may be in decline. The IUCN categories, with examples of animals classified by them, include, Extinct Extinct in the wild Captive individuals survive, critically endangered Faces an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future. Endangered Faces a high risk of extinction in the near future, vulnerable Faces a high risk of endangerment in the medium term. Near-threatened May be considered threatened in the near future, Least concern No immediate threat to species survival. A population size reduction of ≥ 50%, projected or suspected to be met within the next 10 years or three generations, whichever is the longer, based on any of to under A1. E) Quantitative analysis showing the probability of extinction in the wild is at least 20% within 20 years or five generations, there is data from the United States that shows a correlation between human populations and threatened and endangered species. Under the Endangered Species Act in the United States, species may be listed as endangered or threatened, the Salt Creek tiger beetle is an example of an endangered subspecies protected under the ESA. Some endangered species laws are controversial, also lobbying from hunters and various industries like the petroleum industry, construction industry, and logging, has been an obstacle in establishing endangered species laws. The Bush administration lifted a policy that required federal officials to consult an expert before taking actions that could damage endangered species. Under the Obama administration, this policy has been reinstated, being listed as an endangered species can have negative effect since it could make a species more desirable for collectors and poachers. This effect is potentially reducible, such as in China where commercially farmed turtles may be reducing some of the pressure to poach endangered species. Another problem with the species is its effect of inciting the use of the shoot, shovel
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